


set the world on fire

by tesselations



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, Gen, Mage Rights, Sibling Bonding, Warrior!Hawke, aggressive!female!Hawke, because we need more aggressive women, protective!Hawke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-24 23:04:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/945739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tesselations/pseuds/tesselations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marian Hawke was a woman always looking for a fight. In Anders, she found a war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	set the world on fire

**Author's Note:**

> i love love love aggressive, angry, violent female hawke turning gender roles on their heads. and i love anders. and i love protective older sibling hawke. this is basically just a little exploration of hawke's protectiveness, and how she could never have fought for anything but the mages.

When Bethany was eleven and Marian was sixteen, Bethany accused her sister of not caring. She couldn’t remember the reason later, but for the rest of her life, Bethany would remember the smell of Marian’s leather armor, like sweat and oil, when she leaned in, and in the lowest, darkest voice told her, 

“I would kill for you. Don’t make me do that.” 

And something in her eyes told Bethany she already had.

-

Marian Hawke never played nice. When she was young and wrestled with the boys from the farm next door, they expected to win at first. But Marian kicked and scratched and bit, and drew blood from the half –circle of broken skin on one boy’s arm. 

Malcolm had to sit his only daughter down across from him, in the worn wicker chairs of their ramshack home, and look her straight in her mutinous eyes when he prepared to tell her she was in trouble. 

“You have to be good to people,” he said, struggling to explain why she couldn’t just bite people at will. “Unless they started the fight. Did they hit you first?” 

Marian was silent, and Malcolm panicked, because this was his baby girl, even if she won fights against older boys. 

“Did they hurt you?” he asked. She shook her head.

“I hit them first. They called you a freak, daddy,” she said, rushed and as close as she ever would get to apologetic. “They called you a freak and you’re not a freak, you’re mine.”

Malcolm couldn’t tell her she was in trouble after that, it just didn’t feel right. 

“It’s ok sweetheart,” he assured her, “We’re moving anyway. Your mother’s going to have a little sibling for you soon, so we’re going to find a better house.” He didn’t tell her about Templars, or the fact that the neighbor’s wife had seen him mend the house with magic. 

Marian nearly glowed. “A little sister? Or a brother?” she asked excitedly, sweet and child-like. “I’ll take such good care of her!”

-

When Bethany was twelve, she made sparks with her fingers. When she was fourteen, a Templar recruit, one of Carver’s older friends, took a liking to her and wouldn’t leave her alone. So Marian, almost twenty and cruel with it, found him at night with a knife to his throat.

“Maker! Is that how you treat every man who looks at your sister?” he panted.

“Look at her any longer,” Marian hissed, “And you won’t be a man.” She drew her knife low, and just then, Carver slunk out of the shadows.

“Marian! What the hell are you doing!” he asked, accusations pressed between his teeth. The other boy took his chance.

“Your sister is a crazy bitch,” he choked out. “Make her let go of me Carver.” 

Carver looked Marian in the eye. He was not intimidating yet—he was as tall as her now, and he would be broad, but Marian would always be more frightening. But she let the boy go, and refused to look ashamed, or distressed, or apologetic.

“He would have found out about her Carver,” she said levelly.

“You can’t just attack everyone who might find out about her!” he snapped. “It’s not their fault that father’s running around and won’t send her to the Circle! He wasn’t even a Templar Marian, Maker!”

Marian narrowed her eyes.

“It’s not Father’s fault, Carver,” she said. “And if anyone, Templar or not, any fucking Chantry sister or brother comes near her…” she didn’t need to finish her sentence.

Carver’s shoulders slumped.

“They’re just doing their jobs Marian,” he said, quietly ashamed. 

“So am I Carver.” She replied, her voice a shade softer. “What about you?”

Carver stiffened. 

“What if I was that Templar boy?” he asked. And for once, Marian, never without focus and purpose, seemed torn.

“I- I couldn’t—“ she stopped, and looked at him. “You never would be.” 

“No,” he agreed. “I’ve got Bethany too. But this isn’t our fight Marian. You’re not a mage. I’m not a Templar. We’re on the same side.” 

“Those are wise words from a boy,” she said gruffly. Carver shut up, but secretly, he let himself be proud for a moment.

“But” she followed up, “It is my fight. It’s father’s fight, and Bethany’s, and it’s mine too, Carver.”

“You just want an excuse to beat people up,” he groused. Marian shrugged.

“I’m always ready for that,” she admitted.

-

By the time they reached Kirkwall, Carver was tall and broad and dead. Bethany was scared, and Marian was comforting as she always was—that is, not at all.

“Kirkwall’s a bad place for mages,” Marian remembered Malcolm telling her. So it surprised her, somehow, that in the first few years she was there, the most dangerous person she met was not a Templar.

She watched Anders calm himself down, watched the blue cracks on his skin fuse back together, and thought that maybe, just maybe she had finally found that war she had been looking for all along.

-

When Marian Hawke walked into his clinic, the first thing Anders noticed was that she carried herself like a knife, like a weapon. She moved sparingly, but she had a hand on her sword at all times.

“My sister is a mage,” she told him quietly. “And no bloody Templar is going to get her. Or you.” 

The second thing Anders noticed is that when she touched his arm, Justice didn’t protest, or even make a sound. When Marian was there, she was Justice. 

I do like her, yes, the spirit admitted later. She’s willing to fight.

-

Hawke respected him. She didn’t take him to the Deep Roads when he asked her to be left behind.

“You’ve got important things to do up here,” she told him, in her low, throaty voice. God, he wanted to taste her, see if she tasted like blood and metal or like the woman she never let herself be. But he saw some vulnerability when she leaned in to ask, quietly, as if her asking for advice was a secret, “Do you think I should bring Bethany?”

“The Deep Roads are dangerous,” he told her. “But you know how to deal with that. She doesn’t.”

Hawke left Bethany behind.

When she came back, they had her sister in chains, and if Aveline hadn’t held her back, Cullen would have been a bleeding mess on the grounds. 

“Let go of me Aveline. I’ll kill him,” she snarled, twisting in the taller woman’s grasp. “I’ll tear his fucking throat out, let go.” And she watched Bethany, dwarfed by her Templar jailors, slip out of her grasp.

Anders never hated himself and his advice more. 

-

When Hawke burst into his clinic the next day, she had murder in her eyes.

“They took her Anders,” she told him, one hand on her sword. “You need to come get her with me. They took her.” He winced.

“Hawke,” he tried, gently, softly, the way one would talk to a wounded animal. “Marian. Listen.”

Marian listened.

“She will be safe there. She’ll pass her Harrowing, Templar’s won’t try to kill her, and she will be with other mages,” and Maker, how strange was it for him to defend the Circle? But he remembered how Bethany had talked about it, slightly wistful, slightly hopeful.

“They don’t have to kill her to hurt her,” Marian hissed. Anders put a hand on her shoulder, pulled her in.

“If they hurt her, I’ll burn them myself,” he promised her. What was it about this woman and her hard planes that had him making promises that made him sound mad? 

Marian pressed herself to him, the closest to an embrace he had ever seen her in, and his knees went weak.

“That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever told me,” she murmured.

“It’s my battle too,” he promised her. 

-  
“It’s my fight Marian! I can’t just let Ser Alrik make all these mages Tranquil!” he yelled, waving his arms at her. She had refused to help him, and behind her, Fenris leaned languidly against the door of Anders’ clinic, smirking. “Just because Tranquility is something you will never have to deal with—“

Before he knew it, Anders was pressed up against the wall. He towered over Marian, but she was all lean muscle and practiced movements, and she was still more terrifying than him when she told him, quite seriously,

“Never tell me this is not my fight.”

She left, with Fenris and Aveline and Sebastian in tow, and Anders nursed the bruise on the back of his head. He was surprised when she came back alone.

“Don’t question me in front of them,” she told him, pacing like a trapped jungle cat in his clinic. “Sebastian is in the Chantry, you have to be careful. I need him to trust me.”

“You don’t trust him?” Anders asked disbelievingly. She scoffed.

“I don’t trust anyone other than you,” she said quite seriously. “And Bethany. And she mentioned Alrik. Let’s go kill this bastard.”

-

When Leandra died, Marian barely spoke for a week. She locked herself in her house. Varric and Merrill worried about her in hushed voices, Sebastian said a prayer, and even Isabella took a moment to worry about someone other than herself.

But Anders was the only one who, when he knocked, Marian opened the door.

Her knuckles were bloody, and there were shadows under her eyes, and a hole in the wall behind her. The house was silent, save for Dog’s breathing behind her, his whimper when he licked her knuckles.

She let him in without a word, and he sat on her bed with her and pulled her hand into his lap.

“I’m going to heal this,” he told her. She nodded numbly, watching the blue glow envelope her hand. The only noises were their breathing, and the hum of magic. Marian examined his hand around hers, his long fingers, soft palms, the stains of elfroot under his nails, so similar to her father’s hands.

“Say something,” she pleaded. He murmured consolations and kissed her scarred knuckles, and finally, finally, Marian let herself break against his chest like a wave upon a rock. 

“She was mine and I let her die,” she mumbled. “She was all I had left.”

“You’ve got me love,” he promised her. “And I’ve got you.”

She fisted her hands, finally healed, in his robes.

“I would kill for you, you know,” she said seriously.

“You have.” He reminded her, and she kissed him mournfully.

-

“I’m worried about Anders,” Varric confided in Bodhan. “He’s been staying with Hawke, so you’ve seen him. Does he seem… okay to you?” he asked. Bodhan shook his head.

“I don’t want to interfere in Serrah Hawke’s business,” he started hesitantly, “But Master Anders has not been home very much. He often stays out late and comes back in the early morning. They don’t talk very much, anymore.”

Varric nodded warily, and made his way to Darktown, where Anders waited for him with a pillow.

“Are you cheating on Hawke?” he asked abruptly, without his characteristic subtlety and charm. “Because if you are, Bianca and I have words for you.” Anders looked hilariously bewildered, tired, and bedraggled in his black feathery cloak.

“What? Maker, Varric, no, who would I even—you know, nevermind, I’ll keep the pillow.” And then he leaned in, his voice serious and dark like it had been so often lately. “I would never cheat on her.”

“But you’ve hurt her somehow,” Varric said, with certainty, because Hawke seemed lost without Anders now, without a battle to fight, and he knew where to place to blame. Anders wilted.

“I hurt her now so that I won’t hurt her later. Her support has meant the world to me. I would burn down Kirkwall for her, Varric, but I would never drag her down with me,” he said, his eyes glowing blue on the last few words.

Far from setting his worries to rest, Varric was more confused than ever. 

-  
When it was all said and done, and the Chantry was gone, Anders waited, looking at his knees, for Hawke’s judgment. Sebastian yelled at her to kill him, to avenge the Chantry, but Hawke…. Hawke walked over to him, the creak of her armor louder to him than the shouting chaos, and sat by his side.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, her voice quiet and dead.

“You would have tried to stop me,” he said. She shook her head, and grabbed the front of his cloak, and he relished in her pull, the magnetic tension she exerted over him.

“I thought you would know better by now,” she snarled. “This is my fight too Anders, all my life, this has been my fight, my father’s fight, my sister’s fight, your fight. Do not sideline me when you try to help mages. I know what you’re doing. The only way to fight a system is to try and tear it down.”

“I think I was successful,” he replied dryly, before really listening to what she said. “You mean…you aren’t going to kill me?”

Hawke slumped. 

“I couldn’t kill you if I tried,” she admitted. “And I will never try. I would die before I killed you.” And it scared him, how easily she said that.

He wanted to embrace her. He settled for holding her gaze with his. She smiled, a savage, feral thing.

“Now let’s go set this world on fire.”


End file.
